by Roseanna White | Oct 16, 2013 | 17th-19th Centuries, Remember When Wednesdays
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| English Cannon by the Hudson River, Revolutionary WarPhoto by Michael Francis Studios (Michael Cook) |
In what spare moments I’ve had the last week, I’ve been reading a book I’ve had set aside for research for over a year now. One that, when I saw it pop up in my Amazon search at the genesis of an idea, I got so excited about that I bought then and there, though I didn’t actually need it yet, given that I wasn’t actually writing the book, LOL.
I need to put a smidgeon of work into the idea for my agent though, so out it came. To my immense delight. =) The book is Declaration: The Nine Tumultuous Weeks when America Became Independent by Willian Hogeland, and it’s turning out to be all I hoped. A non-fiction book that tells me stories. That presents the wit of the men of the day in ways that make me laugh.
That redefines my assumptions.
See, even after researching for two separate Revolution-era books, I haven’t quite plumbed the depths of how revolutionary this was, this idea that a group of colonies could just break away from its mother country. I can never quite shake the ideas I got in my schooling, that everyone just banded together, put to use their Yankee ingenuity and grit, and ousted the tyrannical government. All Americans for one, and one for all.
A lovely, patriotic picture. Except that “patriot” was an insult at the time. “Lovely” doesn’t begin to describe the fear and uncertainty that Americans experienced. And our people were anything but unified into one coherent picture.
The simple fact is that most people didn’t want independence. They didn’t even understand independence. To them, England was Mother. The king was awful, sure, he was a tyrant. But England…England was home. And just because you don’t like a few parts of it, that doesn’t mean you disown it altogether, right? It just means you try to fix it. And sure, if it comes after you, you defend yourself. So at Lexington and Concord they had no choice. But to seek war? To seek a break?
Unthinkable. That would be like looking your dearly beloved mother–they one who might not always be fair in your eyes, but who had loved you and nurtured you–in the eye and then stabbing her in the gut.
Not something a good person would do. And the leaders, the upright citizens, the majority of the day prided themselves on being noble and just. On holding high ideals, like the philosophers of old. To defend oneself was right. But to take the offense…that would cross a line good people did not cross.
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Painting of Benjamin Franklin, 1778
by Joseph-Siffrein Duplessis |
Most of the Continental Congress had strict instructions, as late as May of 1776, to steer clear of anything that even smelled of independence. To vote against anything that would be more than a vague remonstrance of England’s unfairness. Founding fathers like Benjamin Franklin didn’t come over to the cause until very late in the game–and only then after a decade in England and final humiliation before Parliament that put him in a rage.
It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t simple. And had King George not sent a fleet of hired mercenaries after us (think a mother hiring a gang to come teach her unruly child to listen when she tells him to clean his room), there quite possibly wouldn’t have been enough support to ever make that famous Declaration.
I’ve thought before about the bravery the Patriots showed by standing against the British on the battle fields. Ragtag farmers facing off against the best military in the world. But I’d never really paused to consider how brave (and quite honestly, reckless and heavy-handed) it was for the Sons of Liberty to challenge the prevailing thought of the day. To use guile, intrigue, and rhetoric to convince an unwilling people to follow them into a war most of them didn’t want. It took them decades of work. It took compromise and bullying. But they didn’t just redefine an ideal–they rewrote history. They made their cause so strong that hundreds of years later, school children just think That’s the way it was.
It wasn’t. Not until they made it so.
Do we believe that strongly today? Enough that we’re willing to work all our lives for a goal that most deem foolhardy? Are we willing to fight against prevailing sentiments? When the world says, “You’re crazy,” do we answer, “Maybe, but only until I can change the definition”? It’s a dangerous thing to be that determined. Scary dangerous. And about most causes, I would never dare to be so.
But I pray that when it matters, I could be so brave. So patriotic. So radical in a quest, if the Lord is the one who put it on my heart. I pray I’m cut from the same cloth as those who forged a nation.
by Roseanna White | Oct 9, 2013 | Ancient World, Remember When Wednesdays
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Medieval Miracles, from a 13th century abridgement
of the Domesday Book |
We live in a world of doubt. With special effects and computer graphics, folks can make pretty much anything look real. Look like it happened.
But we know better. Right? It’s all just show. Made up. Pretend.
We’ve been conditioned to doubt. Not just what we see on television, but everything. We’re hard pressed to ever accept anything that looks miraculous, because come on–it’s more likely a hoax. Sleight of hand. Misdirection.
I mean, sure, there were miracles in the Bible. Healing the blind. The lame. Feeding the five thousand. Walking on water. Sure. But that was Jesus. Maybe the apostles. That’s different. And that’s not weird. It’s an accepted kind of miracle, those ones in the Bible. Easy to accept, right?
Then I read it all more closely, and a line of Jim Rubart’s Soul’s Gate comes to mind. “What,” one of his characters says (I may be paraphrasing slightly), “have you only been reading the boring parts of the Bible?”
I mean, seriously. Look at the Old Testament. Saul goes to a medium and calls up Samuel–who appears!
Um…our comfy little spiritual boxes get a little chafing at that one.
On the day Jesus died, the graves opened, and the dead were seen walking about.
Um…that surely means something other than what it sounds like, right? (I included this in A Stray Drop of Blood, and apparently some folks thought I was getting weird and making it up–until they looked it up, LOL.)
In Acts, we read how Paul grew frustrated with a girl with a spirit of fortune-telling and turned around and cast out the demon. Okay. Nothing too worrisome there…until we read on that her master was furious because now he had no way of making money.
Which implies that it worked. She really could tell the future, at least in part. We don’t like that at all, do we? The other side shouldn’t have power like that.
This time of year, you can’t go out in public or turn on the TV without seeing a lot of Halloween stuff. My kids think it’s all grand fun, and they love to ask questions like “Is this real? Or is it pretend?”
And you know…sometimes it’s hard to know how to answer them. Is it real? Mostly no, the things on TV. Mostly not. But then, there’s so much that goes beyond our comprehension, largely, I think, because we’re so quick to doubt. We dismiss everything.
But maybe we shouldn’t. Because if we don’t pay attention to it, we can’t fight it–and a lot of these “weird” stories in the Bible are of God’s servants having to deal with this stuff.
The spiritual world is baffling…but it’s there. And sometimes I wonder what our faith would be like if we were a little more open to learning the truth about it…and a little less quick to ignore all we don’t understand.
I’m delving into some of this in A Soft Breath of Wind…nothing resembling the cartoon ghost, LOL, but I’m reading the Bible carefully and with a point of looking at we normally dismiss as too “weird.” I’m prayerfully asking the Lord for understanding of some of these bothersome parts. And it’s pretty fun to see what new “weirdness” springs up every day in my reading. 😉
by Roseanna White | Oct 2, 2013 | Ancient World, Remember When Wednesdays
As I’ve mentioned on here before, I’m in the midst of doing the Bible-in-a-year schedule…which I started in July. So I’m still in Kings and Chronicles (it’s the chronological Bible, so things are mixed up.)
I’ve read the Old Testament several times in my life, but it’s been a while since I read all the way through it, and this being me, I usually read a story and think, “But what about…?” which leads me to wondering. About things like the unnamed, unmentioned characters obviously present.
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| Samuel Blesses Saul – from Doré’s English Bible, 1866 |
Like when Samuel was a young man, not yet a prophet, a “righteous man of Israel” came and prophesied against Eli and his sons. Insert Roseanna going, “What, no name? Come on! Who was it?? Do we ever see him again? Had he been wronged by those evil sons? How?”
Then many chapters later, after Samuel is grown, we read that his sons weren’t so righteous either. At which point Roseanna goes, “So…when did Samuel get married? To whom??”
I know, I know–those little details aren’t often important in the Old Testament. But still, they make me ask questions. And sometimes surprise me with what information they do offer. (Like how many wives Gideon had–yowza! So didn’t remember that part from my previous reads…)
And since these are the kids of things that inspire me to write, we’ll just keep the questions coming. 😉
Are there any biblical stories that made you pause to wonder about the people missing in the account, but who were obviously there?
by Roseanna White | Sep 18, 2013 | Ancient World, Remember When Wednesdays
Posting late this morning because, er, I totally spaced that it was Wednesday, LOL. We’re in the middle of a move, and my schedule is all weird. So as I dried my hair and realized I’d completely neglected my blog, I scoured my mind for a topic. Any topic.
So this is what you’re getting today. 😉
Back in New Testament times, houses in Israel usually featured some traditional chambers like you might expect. Windows were few, and those there were, were often covered in lattice. Many homes abutted courtyards, or had one all to themselves. But another key feature of the home was the roof.
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Herod’s Temple – not exactly your typical Israelite house,
but it at least shows the flat top, LOL. |
When I first wrote
A Stray Drop of Blood, I had no clue about how important rooftops were in the day-to-day life of an average family. But when I rewrote it back in 2009, I figured it out. Which, you know, made sense with Jesus’s warning about the end days and, “Those who are on the rooftops…”
These roofs were flat, with a small ledge for protection. They had no stairs to them from inside the house–the only staircase would be built against an exterior wall, so you’d have to go outside to get up there. Hence why Jesus’s warning about those on the rooftops is that they won’t take the time to go back inside.
Now, sometimes folks would start with the usual rooftop, but would then build up walls and put on a secondary roof. This, as you may already know, is what they would term an “upper room.” Sound familiar? 😉 These upper rooms would therefore be completely separate apartments, so if someone needed to take in a boarder to make ends meet, it would provide the perfect setup. Tradition holds that the upper room Jesus and the disciples met in for the Last Supper was in the house of John Mark, who wrote the gospel of Mark.
As I’m working on
A Soft Breath of Wind, I just included one of these rooms in Jerusalem. =) Not the same one Jesus was in, LOL, but I
do also have John Mark in my story, given that his Gospel was written for the church of Rome during the same period my book takes place in. I haven’t yet found anything telling me
where he wrote the book, so I’m at the moment taking the liberty of putting him
in Rome during its creation, which works well with my plot. He’s reading the stories of Jesus’s life to my characters as he writes them. =)
Meanwhile, my heroes are in Jerusalem, in that upper room, about to unwittingly bring calamity upon them all… (dun dun duuuuuuuuuuu.)
by Roseanna White | Sep 11, 2013 | Ancient World, Remember When Wednesdays
Occasionally people say to me something along the lines of “I could never write historical fiction. It requires too much research!”
Well, it does, but a lot of it is small. And seemingly random, LOL. I thought it might be fun today to just share some of the crazy-ish Google searches that have come up for me recently as I work on A Soft Breath of Wind. Let’s see if you can figure out what’s going on in the story. 😉
- Latin for no
- History of rivets
- Mediterranean sharks
- Latin for dove
- Money in the New Testament
- Ancient Roman names
- Behind the Name: Hadrian
- Romans 15
- “Foot” measurement history
- Ancient Rome witch
- Legal age in Ancient Rome
- How old was John Mark when he wrote the Gospel of Mark?
- Apostle Paul timeline
- New Testament marriage customs
- The armor of God
- Are there wolves in Italy?
- Trees native to Rome
- History of the caesarean section
Just a few. I could spend longer sifting through my search history, but it’s taking a surprisingly long time, LOL. So that’s it for today. 😉
What are some random things you’ve looked up recently?
by Roseanna White | Sep 4, 2013 | 17th-19th Centuries, Remember When Wednesdays
In preparation for my “Spies in Early America” class I’m teaching my home school group, I decided to get some quills. After all, if one is pretending to be a Revolutionary-era spy and will be writing secret messages in homemade invisible ink, obviously one ought to use a quill pen to do it! Right? Right. =)
The only problem is that, well, finished quill pens are a bit pricey. And since I listed my classes as “free,” I wanted to keep costs to a minimum. As I perused the quill options online, something soon became clear–if I was going to provide quills to 12 students, I needed to buy them uncut, hence cheaply.
Sure. No problem. I could learn to cut quills. I mean, every person who knew how to write for centuries trimmed their own quills. This isn’t a big deal. I’m a smart girl. I can figure it out. Right? Right?? LOL
So I ordered my nice set of a dozen black quills. And as I waited for them to arrive, I read up on the process online, visiting several sites to get the full scope of my project. And the more I read…the more I realized that 12 quills ordered for 12 students gave me absolutely no margin of error. Insert Roseanna taking a trip to Jo-Ann Fabrics.
I ended up with 6 colored quills for $2, the 12 black ones for $7, and a precision knife made by Fiskars. (Colonial folks would have used a pen knife. I, however, have not a pen knife. So I went with a sharp blade that still allowed for control.)
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| My Fiskars Precision Knife |
Then I set up my area. I was working on my old wooden desk, which I didn’t want to score with my blade, so I put a cutting board down. Then I got to work preparing the quills. The first step is to shave off excess feathers, as you can see from the mound of colored fluff in the above picture. The idea is to make sure it sits comfortably in your hand without the barbs annoying you. I have tiny hands, so I didn’t have much to worry about. But men would have to shave off more, for sure. And most people from days bygone would have stripped the quill entirely. For ascetics, I didn’t do that here.
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| See how the feathers hit my hand at first? |
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| After trimming, the feathers don’t start until after my hand. |
You’ll also want to shave the feathers from the middle section of the quill, where they’re really fluffy. I actually found that with the feathers I was using, if I took off all the fluffy looking ones from middle and sides, that was a good rule for how far to shave.
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| Shaving fluffy feathers from inside the rib |
I then cut off all the tips of the feathers. This has to be done at some point, and one of the articles I read said to do it before tempering. Others said after. I see no big difference when you do it, so…whenever, LOL.
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| Quill with tip removed |
Then comes the tempering–this is when you harden your quill. The quill wears away with use, so if you start with a harder shaft, it’ll last longer. You can soak them overnight in water to really help the process, but since these are for recreational use, I went straight to the heat tempering.
For this part of the process, you fill a can with sand and pop it in a 350-degree oven for about 15 minutes. Since I was doing so many quills at once, I used a cake pan. Once the sand is heated, pull it out of the oven and bury your quills in as far as they’ll go.
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| Quills getting their heat treatment in 350-degree sand |
Leave them in there until the sand has cooled. I did this part in the evening and left them until morning when I was ready to start working on them again.
Next comes the part I feared messing up royally–cutting. Getting out my handy-dandy precision knife again, I studied the diagrams and descriptions on the various websites and distilled it down to a few main steps.
1. Make a slice at an angle to take away about half the diameter of the quill.
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| The first slice. |
2. Once you’ve opened the shaft, you can see that inside is a series of circular membranes. Get those out with the tip of your blade and, in the section beyond your cut, some little pokey thing. I used a cuticle shaper from a pedicure set, LOL.
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| Removing the membrane |
3. Then you do the slices to form your nib. Start by making a slit parallel to the shaft and centered, from the tip up about 1/4 inch. This helps the ink flow to the point
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| Making the slit |
4. Then you start shaping the point into a nib. Here are some pictures from various angles.
5. The final step is to work the point. I just pressed my blade to the tip, perpendicular to the shaft, to square it off. Then took it at an angle from both top and bottom to get the best edge.
As I practiced using them, I trimmed a bit here and there until I found the shape that made the ink flow best. And of course…
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary. 